Strike on Iran

Introduction

United States and Iran do not have any official diplomatic relations between them in the present day. Because of the reduced affairs within the Pakistani embassy situated in Washington D.C. Iran has maintained an interest section rather than having an ambassador for United States. Similarly, within the Switzerland's embassy (located in the capital city of Iran i.e. Tehran) the United States has also maintained its interest section since 1980. Moreover after 1995, U.S. banned its trade relation with Iran; this ban was put into action by Bill Clinton. This paper evaluates current issues in international relations between United States and Iran with reference to a number of articles and argues United States' strike against Iran.

Discussion

One of the persistent agenda in world politics has been proliferation of nuclear weapons. This concern at various points of time brought together Cold War rivals and also divided trusted allies. Non-proliferation drive of the US during the Cold War faltered at the altar of national interest and Pakistan acquired the nuclear weapon capability. In the post-9/11 era, the US turned Pakistan into a major non-NATO ally and India into a strategic partner and established a new framework to forge civilian nuclear cooperation, but North Korea walked out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and detonated nuclear devices posing new challenges for the U.S. In the mean time, Iran's nuclear activities drew world attention. Washington's concerns over Iran overshadowed the nuclearisation of North Korea. Iran's suspected quest for a nuclear weapon status in the midst of US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan sparked hectic diplomatic efforts and implicit threat of use of force to prevent proliferation. Significantly, Iran persistently projects its desire to harness nuclear energy and nothing else, but Americans cutting across the political divide believe that Iran has nuclear weapon ambition. While there are Iranian efforts and policy that generate suspicion of Tehran's ultimate goal, there exists no clear evidence that Iran pursues a nuclear weapon program, but the suspicion itself has led to an intense debate over acceptable options for the U.S.

In the midst of a global war on terrorism, the US intelligence agencies came up with the report that Iran was developing a clandestine nuclear weapon program at least until 2003. Although this intelligence estimate was made public in 2007, Iran was believed to be at work to acquire a nuclear weapon capability when President George W. Bush characterized it as part of an 'axis-of-evil' in 2002. It was unnerving to the US policy makers to know about a second Islamic country seeking nuclear weapon. In addition, Iran by that time had survived the US-led political isolation and economic sanctions for decades since the 1979 Islamic revolution. When the Iranian regime considered the US as a 'Great Satan', President Bush dubbed Iran as part of an 'axis-of-evil'. Consequently, Washington's anxiety over what it believed to be Tehran's ambition to acquire nuclear weapons was explicable (Bahgat, Pp. 124-36).

However, no intelligence analysis could produce any conclusive evidence to suggest that Iran was ...